How are sport drinks supposed to hydrate you more than drinking water?
In: Biology
For me, I prefer a sports drink (if I have one handy) over water when I’m playing sports because I don’t really like the taste of water so I tend to under-hydrate if I only have water to drink. Having said that, I ALWAYS have at least one bottle of water handy when I’m playing a sport because I know how essential it is.
You have 100 units of water and 100 units of salts in your body.
You sweat a bunch, you now have 50 units of water and 80 units of salts.
You drink 50 units of pure water, you now have 80 units of water, 80 units of salts and 20 units of urine.
When you sweat, you lose a lot of sodium. You may remember from high school bio, a cellular process called the sodium-potassium pump. It’s the way your cells hydrate. Since you’re losing so much sodium through sweat, you need more sodium to keep your cells hydrated, as well as potassium to keep the process in balance. That’s really all there is to it. The sugar actually does nothing but give you a temporary boost in energy and make the drink taste good – nothing to do with the hydration part.
Some of y’all need to do some yardwork in Houston Texas and then comeback and tell me Gatorade doesn’t work. I prefer g2 bc I find it easier to drink than regular G. G zero just tastes like expired Gatorade you found on the floor.
They don’t. Its actually better to drink water. And its also filled with sugar. It does taste good and is refreshing. But yeah what you saying is some sort of a myth
I’d like to have a better understanding of *structured water*. I have heard people discuss the ways that plain ol’ tap and bottled water, and even water processed with expensive at home filters are filtered and structured in a manner that actually do not replenish or lubricate the body quite how people imagine. Some have even described drinking unstructured water, especially distilled water without minerals added as harmful in some ways. Of course that doesn’t mean people are better off not drinking water at all. Don’t want to hijack the post, but I’d love to hear more about people’s knowledge of or experience with structured water if any of you are out there – you can pm me or something.
I have an undergrad degree in nutrition, and masters in exercise physiology. I taught college level nutrition and exercise phys for over a decade. Here is my 2 cents:
If you are not exercising hard for at least 45 minutes or more at a time, you likely don’t need either the electrolytes or the sugar. If you are exercising hard ( and I mean HARD), for ~45 minutes or more or just sort of hard for a longer period of time, drinking a sports drink while exercising will certainly improve performance. But if your goal is weight management or similar rather than performance, you can do without the sugar. It is typically a couple of hours or more before you really need the electrolytes, as you’ll replace them when you eat food. But I can see people who do construction work or similar and sweating in the heat needing electrolyte supplements. If you exercise a bunch without replacing electrolytes, you can get hyponatremia- or low salt levels in your blood, and it can be deadly. This happens occasionally with inexperienced exercisers doing something like a marathon and drinking water only with no salt. But it happens to the slow people, because the runners finishing in sub 3 hours don’t have time to GET hyponatremia and and dilute the salt in their blood. If you go to the gym and ride the bike for 45 minutes. You don’t need sports drinks, and if you aren’t exercising at all, they are a really bad choice. It really sucks they way they market these sugar bombs to uninformed people.
Everyone in here is… really fucking this up. Here’s the answer.
We have several channels in our gut lumen whose purpose is entirely for the cotransport of a few ions, glucose, and WATER together. This is the basis of oral rehydration therapy, and is one of the most major discoveries in the combat of diarrheal infections like cholera in developing nations.
SGLT-1 is the name of a sodium-glucose transporter in the channel in the gut. This channel, coupled with a few ATPases on the other end of the epithelial cells create a downstream gradient for the ions, and cycling of this duo also draws loads of water in.
Sports drinks advertise that they hydrate better than water, because of the potassium and sugar content. If you read the label of coconut water you will find it has potassium and calcium without the sugars. Thus, being a superior way to hydrate.
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